Challenge accepted!
Bragging aside, I think most adult men wouldn’t want to ejaculate more than once a day or so, averaged over a long period of time. But maybe extreme polygamists aren’t like most men.
Why do you think that? It’s not like the stuff runs out like eggs do.
And at least 21 times a month is a good idea in any case. The other 9-10 days are for insurance 
Yes, I can believe that, at least for the old-fashioned style “potentate,” the point of having many wives was to have lots of offspring, and maybe also as a status symbol, as much or more than it was a matter of sexual appetite.
I grew up in Pakistan and while it wasn’t commonplace, it wasn’t rare either. I knew two men with four wives and two with two.
The ones with four were well off religious leaders (one a Member of Parliament during the fake democracy days, military government handpicking MPs). Their wives were serial, ~15 years apart in age, all teenagers at the time of marriage. So first marriage he was ~22 and she was ~17 and fourth one he was 65-70 and she was ~17. Almost identical pattern for both men.
One with two wives married a teenager after his first wife had three girls in 6-7 years and then no children for 10 years. The second wife was a younger teen (yuck) and probably younger than her husband’s oldest daughters. He was a warehouse foreman and almost completely illiterate, but very numerate. The first wife became basically a domestic servant taking care of the household. At the time I had lost contact with them the second wife had produced another two daughters.
The other one with two wives was the father of one of my classmates and (not particularly close) friend… First wife had a son then no children for ~15 years. Father remarried and my classmate, his brother and sister were soon born. After a few years and a dozens of visits to their house, I realized that the elderly (probably ~50, but I was a tween 
) woman in the library was my classmate’s stepmother (?).
I can assure you that knowing the views of all four men that the equal treatment of multiple wives was of absolutely no consideration to them. And who is the judge of whether he can support them financially. The warehouse foreman lived in a three room mud brick house on “unauthorized” land. But compared with most people in his ancestral village, he was quite well off.
Was going to reply to this post, but apparently I’m behind schedule.
Twenty-one times a month? I’d be dead…
This cracks me up.
Tripler
“But there’s still time!!”
Something I read about harems way back when, said that - given there was not much else to do - the infighting in the harems could get nasty, and usually the older females were in charge. So absent preference expressed by the potentate, the older women picked the rotation, so it could be like fighting to be teacher’s pet or to not get noticed, depending on proclivities. For the lord, it was probably more along the lines of when we sit down at the TV and think “what shall I watch tonight?”
Also, when daddy dies, his wives don’t just dissappear in a puff of smoke (except maybe in India). So the harem would have included all the older women still secluded from the previous ruler. The Harem in Istanbul (not Constantinople - that’s nobody’s business but the Turks) was a fairly large establishment.
Apparently the Chinese Emperors with lots and lots of wives/concubines didn’t actually choose who they had sex with on a particular day/night. A schedule was drawn up by palace staff and the assigned woman/women were readied for the emperor, intercourse occurred, and meticulous notes were kept. Thus, it was the usual thing for women to go years between sexual encounters. The whole thing was a lot more ridged for all involved than I think most fantasies of the situation assume. Sounds like it was all duty and zero romance.
It doesn’t seem like anybody with multiple wives is going to have any extra energy to ‘exercise their autocratic powers’ on the side.
As we get older… They say the mind is the second thing to go…
Ridged for her pleasure?
Presumably, as mentioned, the goal was reproduction - number of offspring - so that figured into the rotation schedule too, For example, Osama bin Laden had about 100 (half-) siblings. Number of offspring wa a key prestige point right up there with “how rich are you?”. They don’t call them “Potentate” for nothin’.
I would expect it’s also useful for concentrating wealth and power.
Is extreme polygamy like getting married to multiple people while snowboarding and slamming Mountain Dew?
It might be a good strategy in theory. But we have the infamous example of Kody Brown from the FLDS Church here in the US that shows it doesn’t work.
Of course in his case he wasn’t supporting his wives. In fact it was the opposite, and they were supporting him. It also, from what I gather, ended up with the first three ganging up on the fourth.
There’s an Arabic naming practice that seem germane to this; it’s not uncommon for a man or woman to be called “Abu” or “Umm” plus their child’s name: “Abu Bakr” means “father of Bakr”, and “Umm Faisal” means “mother of Faisal”.
Just the opposite, in Ottoman Türkiye, where half-brothers with competing claims to the throne were often a source of instability. Some sultans solved the problem by executing their siblings; Mehmed III had 19 of his brothers and 20 of his sisters strangled by royal executioners on his accession to the throne. Later sultans (after 1603) shifted to merely locking away inconvenient brothers, a la The Man in the Iron Mask.
Gotta wonder how they came up with THAT number: “Two? No, boring. Three? Naw, that’s still not enough. Maybe five? Naw, that’s too many. Four! Yeah, four. That’s it, that’s the right number…”
Depends what you mean by “concentrating”. The description of Fatḥ-ʿAli Shah’s harem in the link posted sounds like a huge complex housing thousands of people, which required a precise internal administration (with all the ensuing tensions and power struggles) and the whole thing a huge crown expense. Unless I am mistaken in my interpretation, the harem was not making money.
As for power,
Women could not leave the harem precinct on their own; inside the harem they had daily entertainments such as music, dance, theatrical performances, and games. However, their struggles to gain precedence and influence, which were once carried on mostly behind the closed doors of the palace, now reached the outside, and the andarun was transformed into a center of political power struggle. The harem played a decisive role in some crucial moments of Nāṣer-al-Din Shah’s reign, beginning with his own accession to the throne in 1848, which was favored by a coalition led by the Queen Mother, Jahān Ḵānom Mahd-e ʿOlyā (Amanat, pp. 96-98). The queen mother’s intrigues were also crucial in the dismissal and subsequent assassination in 1857 of the Prime Minister Mirzā Taqi Khan Amir Kabir (q.v.; Amanat, pp. 134-36, and passim; Ādamiyat, pp. 666 ff.). Later, Anis-al-Dawla (q.v.), Nāṣer-al-Din Shah’s favorite wife, brought about the dismissal of the Premier Mirzā Ḥosayn Khan Mošir-al-Dawla (1873). These evident political successes obtained by the leading ladies of the harem reinforced the power of this institution: consequently, both Persian policymakers and foreign diplomats sought support within the royal harem.
Is any confusion about this?
Of course, the law only recognizes one legal wife, but there are millions of pages which discuss Mormon polygamy using “wives” because believers of Mormonism or fundamental Mormonism see the women as wives despite a lack of legal recognition.
You can see this everywhere from the Washington Post:
to wiki (for all that is worth).
And no, polygamy was not legal back when Joseph Smith and other early Mormon leaders practiced it, and there are books and books written about that, all of which use “wives.”
great post / username combination